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Comment OMG thank you (Score 5, Insightful) 123

I hate Wayland. Still so frelling buggy. So many unfulfilled promises. So many things that just worked, and worked well, under X have been broken for so very, very long. I hope the teenagers who repllied "pffft" to the graybeards when they said "windowing is hard, secure remote windowing is really hard," have learned their lesson, who replied "X is just too complicated" have now recognized that they have something worse, who opined "the API is too obscure" have been brought to awareness.

Just because something is new does not mean it is better. Keep repeating that. If an old, working system appears to be complex, there just might be good reasons for it.

I used to be able to run remote windows on kinda slow cable with reasonable responsiveness, back in the day, under X. I could even run a browser. I haven't been able to do any of that under Wayland; opening a remote browser window now takes *minutes*, if it works at all, and I've got fat pipes now, compared to back in the day. Wayland, from the user's perspective, has been and remains an unmitigated disaster.

I'm all for bringing back X. Maybe those guys at MIT knew what they were doing.

Comment Re:You know what... (Score 4, Interesting) 369

*All* of the immunotherapy treatments can be considered vaccinations, not just the ones that we give as preventative medicine.

And there are some new ones that are just stunningly good. I've recently seen a presentation on a vaccination for hard cancers that get injected directly into the cancerous mass and don't just improve things, like most radio- and chemotherapies, but *eliminate* the cancer by activating the latent immune cells within the mass. It allows the body to cure itself by removing the cloak of invisibility that cancer creates. This fellow might just win a Nobel. The idea is simple, brilliant, and shockingly effective.

Comment Re:Just what I always expected. (Score 1) 64

I read TFA, and it specifically says that this is the matter that's causing the gravitational effects that were attributed to dark matter. To me, as a layman, that means that dark matter is no longer required to make things come out right. If you don't agree, please explain why, preferably with citations so that people like me can understand it.

Here's a quote from the article:

This "missing matter" doesn't refer to dark matter, the mysterious stuff that remains effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with light (sadly, that remains an ongoing puzzle).

And there isn't a single instance of the word "gravity" or "gravitation" or "gravitational" on that page until you get to the comments and related readings after the editorial portion is done.

Maybe time to get the eyeglass prescription updated?

Comment Re:Don't read the lies (Score 1) 159

Just like an ever increasing amount of "news" in the US, there's some narrative scrambling for clicks rather than facts. US news is starting to push beyond political driven narratives straight into "lying because it's more profitable and we need marketshare".

Directly blame Google for that situation. They're the one who have been aggressively pushing the ad-revenue model. Back before Google, media was supported by a mixture of advertising and subscription. We even had a few media sources that were truly independent and both government-backed, and privately supported by individual subscriptions and contributions. Google poisoned the well, and we are all paying the price.

Comment Re:Compare Starship to the Saturn V (Score 1) 167

The important distinction though is if this was a "preventable" failure that is due to something the engineering community already knows but was just omitted or done carelessly, or if the failure was indeed due to some new physics or unique application.

But just saying "hey we learned that this didn't work" is only useful if you learned a new thing that didn't work - if instead you had a structural failure because you didn't employ known best practices... that's wasteful.

I don't think we know enough at this point to know which case of learning this is. Hopefully it is truly new learning and not just "oh whoops we forgot to inspect those welds."

Submission + - Rapid unscheduled disassembly of a Starship rocket (apnews.com)

hambone142 writes: I worked for a major computer company whose power supplies caught on fire. We were instructed to cease saying that and instead say the power supply underwent a "thermal event". Gotta love it. Continuing, an A.P. store about a SpaceX rocket:

It marked the latest in a series of incidents involving Starship rockets. On Jan. 16, one of the massive rockets broke apart in what the company called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” sending trails of flaming debris near the Caribbean. Two months later, Space X lost contact with another Starship during a March 6 test flight as the spacecraft broke apart, with wreckage seen streaming over Florida."

Submission + - Starship destroyed in test stand explosion (spacenews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: “SpaceX provided no other details about the explosion. It took place as Ship 36 was being prepared for a static-fire test. However, the explosion occurred before the vehicle ignited its Raptor engines.”

Comment Re:Actually pretty good (Score 1) 29

We disagree.

If I'm running an application on one desktop and explicitly select a different desktop to do something else, I want any new child windows from the first application that open when I've shifted to a different desktop to be created on the original desktop. After all, I explicitly directed a change in my attention to do something else while the first computation was churning on something. When I return to the first desktop, I want to have all of the windows from that application right there, rather than scattered across my N virtual desktops.

Years ago, things worked exactly as I described. Now, for whatever reason, there is no way to implement that behavior unless you hardwire specific applications to specific desktops which is unnecessarily restrictive.

The instances where I want a new window to open on a different desktop are exceedingly rare, and I'm happy to move them explicitly under those circumstances. Right now, I have to explicitly move windows all the time. It's just the wrong model for my use case, and, I argue, should at least be a selectable alternative default behavior.

Comment Re:Actually pretty good (Score 1) 29

No, it doesn't do what I want, as far as I have been able to determine. I want the new child window to always appear on the desktop that its parent is on, no matter what desktop that might be. What I can find is that I can tell it to appear on a specific virtual desktop. That's not what I want.

The default now, to open new windows on the current desktop is almost never the right action, at least for me --- it should instead be what I described: open on the desktop of the parent window.

Moreover, child windows should default to open on top of all other windows (sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, and for the life of me I can't tell why). If the new window is not a dialog, it should *never* steal focus; if it is a dialog, it should *always* steal focus (and there should be ways to set overrides, like for Window Rules). As far as I can tell, those settings are not possible with KDE.

Comment Actually pretty good (Score 3, Interesting) 29

There's a brand-new Animations page in System Settings that groups all the settings for purely visual animated effects into one place, making them easier to find and configure. Aurorae, a newly added SVG vector graphics theme engine, enhances KWin window decorations.

Oh, good, that makes it easier to turn all of them frelling off.

Now, don't get me wrong, I enjoy using KDE. It has been remarkably rock solid for my use cases. There are some settings that are always hard to find, but it mostly just works. Given that I can ignore some of the features that they try to push and have had better solutions for years (like Activities, which is better managed by having just a fixed number of desktops with simple keyboard shortcuts, which I've been doing for, literally, 30 years now, or KDE Wallet, or Dolphin, or ...) and still have things work just fine, that says a lot. The idea of building a useful set of tools an not forcing one particular path through them ... that idea resonates deeply for me.

The one aspect of KDE that drives me nuts, however, is that when a process opens a new window, the default should be to open that window on the desktop that the process has been assigned to rather than the current desktop (who, in their right mind, thinks that latter behavior is the right choice?). That, and there's no setting for focus that matches what I want, and the descriptions, despite multiple revisions, remain opaque.

Comment Re:so what happened? (Score 5, Informative) 60

It's a very good question. It looks like it was mainly failures to generate a result within a predetermined time. Some of the failures were due to cryostat hardware failures (a fridge went out during a NIST campus closure); some due to fiber + interferometer polarization drifts; and so on. It also appears that [perhaps?] a few of the misses are due to latencies in the timetaggers to record a common timebase. I can't quite tell from the arXived version of the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.052...

All in all, it's a marvelously good overview of the impressive experiment!

Comment Re:How would this even work? (Score 4, Insightful) 28

Not only that but both launch and re-entry are physically taxing, as long as there are rockets involved. For someone who has cancer, that's probably not a good idea.

All-in-all, someone wasn't thinking through the details. Cancer drugs don't dissolve in water well, and so microgravity is the answer, rather than finding chemical agents that solve that problem in normal gravity? ... Really? ... Really? ... Really?

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